A QUESTION AS TO MODERN RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE.
No one can read the Scriptures without seeing that sin is peculiarly abhorrent to God, and in proportion as we attain to like-mindedness with him, we shall regard it as he does. But is there not, just here, something radically defective in much of the religious experience and religious literature of our day? Lift the biography of one of those earnest men whose preaching and work told so mightily on the minds of the people of a former generation—that, for instance, of Jonathan Edwards; or, to take even a more modern illustration, that of Charles Finney; and, while you will be deeply impressed with the ardor of their devotion to the Lord Jesus, you will be equally so with the depth of their detestation of sin. They loathed it as an utter abomination. They hated it with a perfect hatred. They turned away from it, as one turns from a hideous and revolting spectacle. The very thought of it produced in them what we may call spiritual nausea and revulsion. But we do not find so much of that in the religious experience of these days. Conversing a few evenings ago with some ministerial brethren on this subject, we all agreed that it is now a very rare thing for those wishing to make a confession of Christ to speak strongly and earnestly of the evil of their sins. The element of conviction seems largely now to have dropped out of the religious history of a soul, and the avowal of love to Christ is made without that passionate fervor which necessarily springs from the perception of the abominable character of that sin, from whose curse and pollution he has redeemed it. And the evil resulting from this defective experience has affected the current theology, for those one-sided ideas of the atonement of Christ, and those unscriptural views about future punishment, which are finding such large acceptance among us, have their root in low views of the evil of sin. If sin be not so great an evil after all; if it be a mere superficial thing; if it be a misfortune rather than a crime; if it be a petty peccadillo, rather than a deliberate and defiant antagonism to God, which, if it were allowed to have its way, would hurl him from his throne, and plunge the moral universe into confusion; then redemption from it need not have required the incarnation of Christ, and we may discard from the idea of the atonement all honoring of righteousness, or satisfaction of law. Now, if this be so, the true way to counteract these errors is to deal with that defective experience out of which they have sprung, and make bare to men "the exceeding sinfulness of sin." The answer which is given to the question, "What is sin?" will determine our whole theology, as well as give color to our whole life; and that holiness is to be suspected which makes little of past sins. When we have heard some modern converts speaking of their former lives, we have been shocked with the manner of their reference. They have spoken in a tone of flippancy altogether out of keeping with the subject, and they have evinced little or nothing of the abhorrence of sin which ought to characterize every believer. It has really seemed to us that they had the idea that somehow the very magnitude of their sins gave them more importance. But imagine the apostle Paul speaking in that fashion! The true penitent cannot uncover the past without shame, or speak of it without bitter humiliation before God. His song is that of David, "He brought me up out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, establishing my goings." We raise the questions, therefore, whether many of our modern methods of presenting the gospel, and urging young, unfledged converts to tell their experience, be not tending to so familiarize men's minds with sin that they lose their horror of it? whether we are not losing in our churches the sense of the abominable character of sin? and whether it would not be well for our ministers to set more thoroughly before their hearers the "exceeding sinfulness" of sin, and the fearful retribution of its "wages?"—Christian at Work.